Although Fritz Lang had Jewish heritage on his mother's side, his father was Catholic. Fritz Lang's mother converted to Catholicism after she was married. She took this conversion seriously, and she was dedicated to raising Fritz as a Catholic. Fritz Lang said he was raised "Catholic and very puritanical." As an adult, Fritz Lang always adamantly identified himself as a Catholic. Although he was not a particularly devout Catholic, he regularly used Catholic images and themes into his films.
Fritz Lang was completely uninterested in his mother's Jewish heritage while growing up. Nevertheless, it ended up being a key factor in his career when Nazi Germany rose up around the Austrian-born filmmaker and took over film industry of Germany (his adopted home). Lang was actually offered the opportunity to be supreme Fuhrer over the German film industry, but he instead fled Germany, because, he later claimed, he was fearful about what the Nazi regime would eventually to him because of his half-Jewish heritage.
Throughout much of Lang's life, many people thought of him as Jewish or at least part-Jewish. After Lang's experiences with Nazi oppression he became a staunch anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist; he made a number of anti-Nazi films. Later in life he apparently had some sense of Jewish identity. He may be best described as a partially ethnic Jew whose religion throughout life was a partially observed Catholicism.
From: David Michael Wharton, "Crucified to the Machine: Religious Imagery in Fritz Lang's Metropolis" in Strange Horizons, 6 January 2003
Fritz Lang's Metropolis... Certainly, the film's profusion of religious imagery can be traced back through Lang's lineage. Although his lapsed Catholic father and Jewish mother began their union at best uninterested in religion -- they requested a marriage ceremony stripped of all spiritual trappings, though they did not get it -- they did eventually embrace the tenets of Catholicism. The doctrines of that faith insinuated themselves into Lang, shaping his worldview, his politics, and his cinematic vocabulary. The language of Metropolis -- the themes, the images, the characters -- are all rooted firmly in the language of Judeo-Christian theology.
Judeo-Christianity date to 1899 and 1910 respectively. The term appeared in discussions of theories of the emergence of Christianity, and with a different sense than the one common today. "Judeo-Christianity" here referred to the early Christian church, whose members were Jewish converts and still considered themselves part of the Jewish community.
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